RE: BHA: Emergence

["Marshall Feldman" <marsh@xxxxxxx>]

Viren quoted RB:

In DPF, RB succinctly defines emergence:

"A relationship between two terms such that one term diachronically or
perhaps synchronically arises out of the other, but is capable of reacting
back on the first and is in any event causally and taxonomically
irreducible to it."(397)

"In emergence, generally, new beings (entities, structures, totalities,
concepts) are generated out of pre-existing material from which they
could have been neither induced nor deduced."(49)

Viren then goes on to quote RB as saying:

"Emergence entails both stratification and change.  But if, as I have
argued, all changes are spatio-temporal, and space-time is a relational
property of the meshwork of material beings, this opens up the phenomena
of emergent spatio-temporalities."(53)

Viren then says: "So in Bhaskar's view, time and space, which are the
conditions for change,
themselves emerge from material beings."

Now at the risk of being too scholastic, I don't see this. If "space-time is
a relational property of the meshwork of material beings," why would this
necessarily imply that the former "arises" from the latter? If the time it
takes for light to travel from the sun to the earth is "a relational
property" of the sun and the earth, wouldn't the time still emerge from
their relative LOCATIONs in SPACE, as well as the speed of light, rather
than the material beings of the earth and sun per se? Even if the sun
stopped emitting energy, the time for light to travel between the two
heavenly bodies would still be fixed at the level of the real.

In other words, "property" does not necessarily imply emergence, and it's
not clear that RB has properties in mind when he speaks of emergence.
Otherwise, we'd have to think of the color of paint as emerging from the
paint itself, with one being prior to or more fundamental than the other
rather than the property and the paint being of a piece. Color certainly
isn't capable of reacting back on paint, is it?

What I'm trying to do here, besides understand RB who is sometimes quite
obscure, is to figure out where time and space fall in his ontology. As
someone who works in the "spatial sciences," I have a stake in, and
regularly run across literature endorsing the view of, space as
ontologically on par with time and matter. This still would not preclude
spatio-temporalities from being emergent any more than water, a form of
matter with certain properties, cannot emerge from oxygen and hydrogen, two
other forms of matter with certain properties.

	Marsh Feldman



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